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As a workin’ man (as my grandfather would say), I confess that I enjoy the moaning of my friends still in college, whose life that I left not too long ago. The truth is that, while I am now ascending toward middle age hair loss with increasing rapidity, and I no longer have to worry about exams, there are many parallels between agency work and the life of a student.
I’m not a big fan of the corporate language that gets tossed around, terms like “leveraging” and “strategic.” It may well be that the only reason I can make a living writing content at a PR agency is because I cannot stand it when people use this terminology when they are trying to communicate a message to other human beings. I have to fix it, I have to translate it – so be a language service provider, it’s a compulsion. I do understand that this is a largely personal bias, and I do recognize the technical need for industry-specific terminology, but one of the greatest boons we can offer our clients as a boutique agency that is organizationally separate from their companies is a little bit of interdisciplinary perspective.
As an agency, we are lucky. We have successful clients that span wildly divergent industries, and we are exposed to executive teams that think, work, and talk about issues in richly diverse ways. It’s much like college was when the computer science majors hung out with the sociology kids, the geology majors, and the business students. You find yourself saying “oh, that’s just like this that we’re studying, only different!” Cross-pollination of diverse ideas and approaches gives us vigor, and it also seems to give us a certain neutrality that is necessary when creating campaigns and stories designed to appeal to real people.
Journalism is one of those fields that has a certain fundamental professional integrity to it that almost demands that people cut through the flim flam, and I like that. But journalists and businessmen both sometimes fall victim to getting caught up in the parochial viewpoints of their respective disciplines, never coming out of their departmental lounges to learn more about each other and the world. Of course, many do develop broad perspectives and get on just fine, but often there is little time for this, and often there is not even enough time to notice that their perspective is limited.
As PR agents, we are that odd and rare breed: the General Studies Major. Specialist in nothing, fascinated by everything, guy you meet in class who can tell you the philosophical implications of Schrodinger’s Paradox. We love meeting specialists and people passionate about what they do, and have the grounding to weave their stories into the broader narrative of our world.
I may have gotten overly romantic toward the end there, but it’s Christmas and it’s time to celebrate the light in the world and doing what we love. So I offer no apology, only a jolly Yule to our blog readers, and an encouragement to college students and interns: the world isn’t going to change too much when you graduate. Just maybe less hair falling out. Hopefully